A platform of interest is adapted to support humans, weapons, sensors, or other types of equipment. Military transport aircraft, civil aircraft, helicopters, armoured vehicles, a military facility or a civilian building are examples of platforms of interest.
In certain cases, the platform of interest is confronted with threats that benefit from an optical or optronic guidance system. For example, missiles are guided by optronic components.
In addition, the equipment units that guide these menacing objects use an ever increasing number of spectral bands. For example, the bands that are used include the visible-, near infrared-, or thermal bands. The radiation belongs to the visible band if its wavelength is comprised between 400 nanometers (nm) and 800 nm, to the near infrared band if its wavelength is comprised between 800 nm and 2.3 microns (μm), and to the thermal band if its wavelength is comprised between 3 μm and 5 μm or between 8 μm and 12 μm.
It is therefore desirable to protect the various different platforms from all types of menacing objects making use of an optronic guidance system.
In order to do this, it is a known practice to use appropriate means of detection and of counter measures that are adapted to deal with a large number of threats. Thus, various systems have been proposed such as optronic counter measure devices having lasers which, in particular, enable interference in all of the abovementioned bands.
The lasers employed are, for example, solid lasers associated with parametric oscillators, use of these parametric oscillators enabling the provision of strong peak power.
Such lasers have proven to be cumbersome, which poses problems when it comes to integrating them in the platforms considered.
In order to solve this problem, the laser sources are moved off relatively far away from the imaging and beam pointing systems of the platform. This distancing imposes the use of transport optics in addition to the collimating optics in order to bring the laser beams from the outlet of the laser sources up to the imaging and pointing systems.
The multiplicity of wavelengths of the laser sources requires for the transport and collimation optics to be capable of transmitting multiple different wavelengths with a low absorption level. The processing of the required optics then proves to be difficult to carry out technically apart from being expensive.
There is therefore a need for an optronic device whereof the production and operational implementation are simpler than for known devices offered by the state of the art.